What went wrong with our happiness
medium.com
medium.com
We've become so convinced that our science-based approach holds all the answers that we've forgotten a crucial distinction: there's a difference between an informed life and a good life. Traditional approaches often focused on prevention—building resilience, teaching coping skills, and creating supportive communities before problems arose. But prevention doesn't fit our therapeutic language of diagnosis and treatment.
This reflects a broader cultural shift where we believe we can engineer solutions for every aspect of human experience. We're so focused on what we can fix that we've lost sight of what already worked - and it often worked without an intervention.
Nicely said!
The "individual" was always considered as part of a greater whole and never all alone left to fend for himself. Community/People were central and Materialism was just an enabler and not the end goal.
The fundamental problem is that the Scientific Revolution upended everything we had known and around which we had built our social structures. People were born into an existing "social framework structure" which they followed obediently without questioning and when something went wrong/did not understand, they simply attributed it to an almighty "G-O-D" and washed their hands off of it. Being absolved of any personal responsibility and not being forced to learn and make hard decisions and live with its consequences is highly cognitively consonant rather than dissonant and keeps one "Happy". Mere Scientific Knowledge without resolution into a coherent and understandable framework leads to more cognitive dissonance and hence keeps one "Unhappy".
The solution is to use Modern Science to understand Objective Reality and use ancient Philosophical Concepts/Frameworks from Hindu/Buddhist/Greek Cultures to mould our Subjective View of it (but without going off into la-la land).
And that condition was justified drive to more individualism, more impact in their own life.
However, in the recent years and decades it has gone too fare. We have become rootless and disconnected.
The end goal is what the Hindus/Buddhists call "Kaivalya/Moksa/Nirvana" and the Greeks "Eudaimonia". This is not fleeting sensory happiness but a steady state of calm flowing happiness. While it is commonly thought of as necessitating stepping away from everything (i.e. renunciation) that is not necessary. You can engage with the World and yet stand apart from it by letting sensory enjoyments come and go while maintaining mental equanimity throughout.